When I started the Classic_DM YouTube channel, the idea was to evangelize the beauty and fun of the game 40 years later. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons had a huge impact on my life, my profession, and my creativity. In the beginning, I knew I did not want to become a streamer and at the same time, not try and develop content that was video editing heavy or full of hard cuts. Instead, I decided to capture one-take live play sessions. After all, all I wanted to do was go back in time to when I was 13 years old and play the game.

Initially, I streamed the show using my home made Battle Glass and handmade tokens on Twitch. This allowed me to capture the play sessions live while also facilitating a cloud-type storage space I could export over to YouTube with a few clicks. In December I found myself out of state with only a mega-sad satellite internet connection slower than an X-Boat (for all you Traveller players) so that had to change. I started making the videos locally and saving them out to an external hard drive, and then uploading.

Along the way, I started getting questions. Not really subscribers, but lots of questions. Questions about how time works in the game, combat, classes, my house rules, and mostly from players who play 5th edition, had never played first, but were intrigued about it. in response, I started the Learn to Play series. I shared it in some of the Facebook groups and it began to gain momentum. So let’s take a step back and see how things have evolved.

Above we see the top five videos based on watch time. I like to use this metric to get a sense of what viewers are interested in.

58,396 minutes is close to 973 hours for just one video

Here is the growth since I started the channel back in later September of 2018. Since moving all the content to my author and game design website and restructuring, there’s been a good amount of growth!

It’s a modern world. View time splits between PC and Smart Phone use!

Summary

It’s fun to see some things take off. If you have any specific requests, be sure and let me know! There is still a lot to improve upon and we’re just getting started!